Download PDF | Suraiya N. Faroqhi - The Cambridge History of Turkey_ Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839-Cambridge University Press (2006).
642 Pages
Volume 3 traces the history of the later Ottoman Empire from the death of Mehmed III in 1603 to the proclamation of the Tanzimat, the administrative reconstruction of the Ottoman state, in 1839. This was a period of alternating stability and instability when trade between the empire and Europe flourished and, wartime apart, merchants and pilgrims could travel in relative security. However, despite the emphasis on the sultan’s role as defender of the faithful and of social order, tensions did exist between the ruling elite in Istanbul and their subjects in the provinces, not least because of the vastness of the empire and the unpropitious natural environment with which those subjects struggled on a daily basis. This theme is one of the central motifs of the volume, where contributors look at the problems provincial administrators faced when collecting taxes and coming to terms with local soldiers and the politically active households of notables. Other sections focus on religious and political groups, non-Muslim minorities, women, trade, handicrafts, life in the Ottoman countryside and, importantly, music, art and architecture. The history sets out to demonstrate the political, cultural and artistic accomplishments of the Ottomans in the post-classical period, which runs contrary to traditional and still widespread notions that this was a period of stagnation and decline.
Suraiya N. Faroqhi is Professor at the Ludwig Maximilians Universitat in Munich, Germany. Her most recent publications ¨ include Subjects of the Sultans: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire(2000) and The Ottoman Empire and the World Around it (2004).
Introduction
Massive size and central control It is by now rather trite to emphasise that the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stretched from what were virtually the outskirts of Vienna all the way to the Indian Ocean, and from the northern coasts of the Black Sea to the first cataract of the Nile. But the implications of this enormous presence are so significant that in my view the risk of triviality must be taken. As a recent work on British imperial history has shown, even in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, King and Parliament wished for the sake of Britain’s trade and power in the Mediterranean to live at peace with Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, even though quite a few British subjects rowed on the galleys of these cities.1 This conciliatory stance was not only due to the fortifications maintained by the three ‘corsair republics’, or even to the power of their navies, but resulted mainly from wider political concerns.
Given the precarious situation of bases such as Gibraltar, angering the Ottoman sultan, who was after all the overlord of the North African janissaries and corsair captains, might have had dire consequences for British trade and diplomacy. Certainly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, any number of European authors wrote books on the imminence of ‘Ottoman decline’.2 But when it came to the judgement of practical politicians, before the defeat of the sultan’s armies in the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–74, the power of that potentate was taken seriously indeed. In this same context, it is worth referring to the relative peace that prevailed in most of Ottoman territory for most of the time. Even if the sultan’s writ ran but intermittently in border provinces, or in mountainous areas, deserts and steppes, what was by the standards of the time a reasonable degree of security was the general norm. This allowed foreign merchants, pilgrims and even Christian missionaries to travel the highways and byways of the Balkans, Anatolia and Syria.
These activities were often considered so important in Versailles, The Hague or London that accommodation on the political level, with the Ottoman central government but also with a variety of provincial potentates, seemed in order. Compromises with the sultan were deemed necessary in order to effect repairs to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and to allow Franciscans or Jesuits to attempt to persuade Orthodox or Armenian Christians who were also Ottoman subjects that they should recognise the supremacy of the Pope.3 But above all stood concerns of trade. Thus allowing the Ottoman ruler to use European ships active in the eastern Mediterranean for the wartime provisioning of his armies and towns seemed a reasonable quid pro quo when the French, British and Dutch governments considered the value of their respective subjects’ Ottoman commerce. Apart from the customs and other duties paid by Levant traders in Marseilles, London or Amsterdam, there were important industries, especially in France, that depended on supplies from the Ottoman realm. Marseilles’s soap factories, a major eighteenthcentury industry, could not have functioned without inputs from Tunis or Crete.4
The manufacture of woollens was another case in point. When at the end of the eighteenth century the Ottoman market collapsed, the formerly flourishing textile centre of Carcassonne near Montpellier reverted to the status of a country town, its inhabitants now resigned to living off their vineyards.5 Once again, the Ottoman Empire was of great size, and moreover its sociopolitical system had put down deep roots in most of the territories governed by the sultans, whose subjects profited from this situation in their commercial dealings. This becomes clear when we take a closer look at the caravan routes. In the 1960s and 1970s it was customary to emphasise the rise of maritime communications through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and to conclude that the Ottoman Empire could scarcely avoid declining because it was increasingly marginalised by world trade.6
This view is widely held even today. However, if I am not mistaken, there are good reasons to be somewhat wary of this interpretation, at least with respect to most of the period studied here. First of all, we have come to see that even though land routes – or combined land–sea routes such as the connection from Aleppo to India – now handled a smaller share of overall traffic, what remained in the hands of Ottoman merchants, Muslims, Christians and Jews taken together was still substantial. Second, a relatively declining demand in Europe for raw silk and other goods from the Balkans and the Middle East gave Ottoman manufacturers a ‘breathing space’ before, in the early 1800s, they were exposed to the full force of the European-dominated world market: an advantage rather than a disadvantage.7
It is therefore not so clear that the Ottoman economy was in fact being marginalised before the mid eighteenth century, and in consequence unable to service the sultan’s armies and navies. Fernand Braudel’s conclusion, in the later phases of his career, that the Ottoman Empire maintained itself well into the later 1700s due to its control of the overland trade routes is therefore well taken.
Linkages to the European world economy However, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, certain regions of the Ottoman Empire maintained close and even intimate contact with European traders. Evidently the olive-growers of Crete and Tunisia depended on French demand for their oil. There is also the example of Izmir: this city had been of no particular importance in the ‘classical’ urban system of the sixteenth century, and only grew to prominence when that system lost some of its solidity after 1650 or thereabouts. Here, French, English and Dutch merchants established themselves over long periods of time, profiting not only from the transit trade in Iranian silk but also from the export of cotton and raisins, trades which were sometimes legal and at other times not. Certainly Izmir remained a primarily Muslim town, with locally prominent families constructing khans and renting them out as investments. Yet the city’s economy by 1700 certainly was geared to trade with Europe; and when Iranian silk fell away after 1720 or so, once again locally grown cotton was available to fill the gap.9
Thus until about1760 the Ottoman centre remained in control of its overland routes. Local production, which until this catastrophic decade had managed to prosper in quite a few places, was mainly geared to domestic markets. After all, before the advent of steamships and railroads it was not a realistic proposition to import consumer goods for ordinary people. Even after the 1760s, especially once relative security had been restored under Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), many local producers competed reasonably well with imported goods.10 But even so at this time certain regions were becoming increasingly integrated into European commercial networks. Further links were established during the second half of the eighteenth century, when the need for financial services and the concomitant lack of Ottoman banks allowed French traders especially to engage in financial speculation and export money from the Ottoman Empire, an undertaking not usually profitable in earlier times.11 While the Ottoman central government resorted to foreign borrowing only in the course of the Crimean war, at least some of its provincial representatives had become implicated in the financial dealings of European merchants about a hundred years earlier.
The attractions of eastern neighbours Well-to-do Ottoman consumers did not limit their purchases from foreign lands to European goods, and thus Ottoman merchants traded both with the East and with the West. In Cairo around 1600, there were even some merchants who, through their trading partners, maintained contacts in both directions.12 Spices from South-east Asia were consumed in the Ottoman lands: in the years before and after 1600, when Yemen was an Ottoman province, certain ports paid their dues in the shape of spices, more valuable in Istanbul than they would have been on the shores of the Indian Ocean. The quantities of pepper kept in the storehouses of Anatolian pious foundations indicate that this was a popular condiment even in medium-sized cities. Moreover, just as eighteenth-century consumers in Europe came to prefer the sweetness of cinnamon to the sharpness of pepper, the Ottoman court, though otherwise conservative in its tastes, also switched to cinnamon at about the same time.13 All this demand made Ottoman merchants into active participants in the Asian spice trade. In addition there were Indian cottons, with imaginative designs in bright, durable and washable colours, that enchanted the better-off Ottoman consumers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries just as much as their counterparts in early modern Europe.
Indian producers of printed cottons thus worked simultaneously for the European, African, Southeast Asian and Ottoman markets, entering some ‘Turkish’ motifs into their repertoires.14 Most goods from South-east Asia entered the Ottoman Empire by way of Cairo, but the Cairene merchants did not often venture further south than Jiddah. In consequence, the importation of these spices meant that Indian merchants, usually Muslims, appeared not only in Cairo or Istanbul, but occasionally even in small Anatolian towns. Unfortunately for our understanding of these connections, Indian merchants did not count on support from their respective home governments. There was thus no diplomatic correspondence of the type that has allowed us to evaluate, at least to some extent, the implications of the French, Dutch and English presences in Istanbul, Izmir or Sayda. Rather more information is available on Iranian Armenians, from documentation produced by these traders themselves, but also from Safavid and diverse European sources; that these merchants also have found their way into Ottoman records is less well known.15
Trade with Iran was often disrupted by political conflict; in certain years of the early eighteenth century it ground to a virtual standstill when war brought silk production to an end.16 Yet even so, Armenian merchants subject to the shah are documented not only in the major port cities, but also in minor provincial towns. Thus we must assume that at least some of them traded in other goods apart from silks; perhaps the far-flung connections of the Armenian trade diaspora allowed certain of its members to bring in Indian fabrics. While Ottoman trade connections to India and Iran are thus more difficult to document than their European counterparts, at least some of them have come out into the open and, with some patience, more can surely be unearthed. In addition, the study of these eastern trade connections also has made us understand that the different commercial centres of the empire did not all provide the same conditions for trade. Certainly the Ottoman central power had adopted principles of administration valid throughout its territories, to wit a tendency to orient itself according to precedent if at all feasible, a concern with provisioning the consumers’ markets at low prices and, most importantly, an inclination to consider economic action unremittingly and exclusively as a source of fiscal revenue (traditionalism, provisionism and fiscalism, according to the formula invented by Mehmet Genc¸).17 But this general framework did not prevent trade conditions in Cairo or Aleppo, where long-distance merchants were accorded considerable leeway, from differing vastly from those prevailing in the sultans’ rather over-administered capital.
The perils of war However the size and – until the 1760s – still impressive power of the Ottoman Empire was relevant not only to traders, but above all to sultans, viziers, kings and ministers – including the Estates General of the Netherlands.19 It is often forgotten that while the Ottoman sultans by the mid sixteenth century had reached more or less permanent frontiers against Habsburgs and Safavids, they were, over a century later, still quite capable of major conquests from second-order states such as Venice and Poland. According to recent research, the seventeenth-century Habsburgs at their eastern fronts used technology and tactics reflecting the early modern military reformation; and since down to the late 1600s, the Ottomans held their own against the emperors’ armies, their own procedures were less old-fashioned than they have often been made out to be.20
Thus very large cannons, so often viewed as a sign of Ottoman military inefficiency, were apparently produced ‘for show’, while just as in European armies the real job of fighting devolved upon medium-sized and small guns. Thanks to a number of studies both of individual campaigns and of Ottoman warfare in general, the strengths and weaknesses of the sultans’ armies now can be evaluated with a degree of confidence. Well into the seventeenth century, one of the Ottomans’ strongest points was the commissariat. While the miseries of war were universal, the sultans’ armies were on the whole somewhat better supplied than their European counterparts.21 Peasants provisioned the stopping-points along army routes, and craftsmen were drafted to accompany the soldiers, so as to obviate recourse to urban markets, where military discipline would have been difficult to maintain. Of course this arrangement had its disadvantages; peasants were paid little if anything for their services, and artisans also could not hope to recover their costs.
Thus wars exacerbated the difficulty of capital formation, even under normal circumstances the Achilles’ heel of the Ottoman socio-economic set-up, and the collapse of the army supply system in the second half of the eighteenth century seems to have been at the root of the military debacle of those years.22 When food, clothing and tents were no longer supplied, soldiers attacked townsmen and villagers in order to provision themselves ‘at source’. Even worse, Orthodox villagers taxed beyond the limits of endurance now tended to side with the Tsar, while in previous centuries, projected incursions into Ottoman territory on the part of Christian rulers had in most cases attracted but minimal support from the sultans’ non-Muslim subjects. In all probability the supply system collapsed when it did due to overload. It had long been customary in the Ottoman realm to demand deliveries for the military at prices that in many cases did not even cover production costs. Artisans responded by lowering the quality of their goods, and presumably the grain supplied at stopping-points by hapless peasants must often have been inedible.23 Yet down to the late seventeenth century, the problems involved presumably remained manageable because the quantities of food and clothing demanded remained within – admittedly often rather wide – limits.
But by the second half of the eighteenth century, if not earlier, military demand had reached a level that was simply too high for Ottoman taxpayers to support any longer. Perhaps this collapse was comparable to the war-induced crises that France for instance suffered in the years around 1700, and it was the Ottomans’ misfortune to be confronted at this particularly dangerous moment with the empire of Catherine II.24 After all, even if Russian resources were mobilised at but a minimal level, Russia possessed far greater supplies of wood, metals and other raw materials than were available in the Balkans or the Middle East. Supplies apart, a number of studies have focused on military manpower. Already in the second half of the sixteenth century, the importance of cavalry armed only with swords and lances was on the wane, and this process continued during the 1600s. In order to recruit the large armies that the major empires fielded during their assorted wars, the sultans, like many European rulers, came to rely on musket-wielding mercenaries hired for a single campaign only.25 By contrast, the holders of tax assignments (sipahi), who owed cavalry service and were counted as members of a privileged corps of men serving the sultan (askeri) were gradually phased out. Musketeers hired on a short-term basis throughout the seventeenth century mutinied with some frequency, usually because of their rivalries with the established military corps. After all, the latter possessed a job security unattainable to the mercenaries, who did however own the weapons with which they might force the provincial governors who had originally recruited them to lead them in their rebellions.
In their turn the pashas themselves, as contenders for the grand vizierate, might need little prodding. Particularly during the early seventeenth century, these mercenary rebellions were extremely destructive to Anatolian taxpayers in town and country. Entire regions were laid waste for many years, as the inhabitants fled to walled towns or barricaded themselves in rural fortresses. From the central government’s viewpoint, this situation meant that no taxes could be collected; yet official attempts to repopulate abandoned villages met with mixed success at best. The desertion of the more arid regions of central Anatolia, especially of the plains and valleys, dates from this period and was only reversed from the late nineteenth century onwards; this catastrophe must be viewed as an indirect consequence of the transition to mercenary warfare.
The central power and provincial society: the advantages of decentralisation Recent work concerning Ottoman provinces, often focused on the Arab world, has permitted us to better understand the dynamics inherent in seventeenthand eighteenth-century decentralisation, which can no longer be regarded as a manifestation of ‘Ottoman decline’ and a precondition for proto-nationalism.27 At the basis of regional power in the hands of resident magnates we often find tax-farming, especially the acquisition of the lifetime tax-farms (malikane ˆ ), instituted in 1695, which sometimes became quasi-hereditary. In addition there was the power to distribute taxes levied on an entire province among individual settlements, with the possibilities of patronage this implied. We have also come to understand that at the beginning of ‘our’ period, or even in the sixteenth century, the central administration’s power never controlled its territories in any uniform fashion.
Thus in Syria local lords living in rural fortified houses dominated the countryside for over a century after the Ottoman takeover. A bout of centralisation only occurred in the 1630s, but by 1700 a local family had managed to establish itself as governors of Damascus retaining this position for over half a century.28 Given the importance of Syria, both because of its inherent productivity and because of its strategic location on the pilgrimage route to Mecca, it is obvious that we have, in the past, rather exaggerated the dominance of the Ottoman centre at any time in its history. Yet decentralisation did not mean disintegration, but is today often viewed as a rather effective means of government in an age before telegraphs and railways.29 Holders of lifetime tax-farms had a vital interest in remaining subjects of the sultan. For if a province were to become detached from the empire the tenants of malikane ˆ s, of course apart from the single family that turned itself into the new ruling dynasty, would have had no guarantee that their claims would continue to be honoured. There was moreover enough rivalry among the holders of major lifetime tax-farms for the Ottoman central administration to practise a policy of divide et impera: often when in the years around 1800, the sultan wanted to eliminate an overly powerful magnate, he only needed to let loose the latter’s local competitors.
This combination of deadly rivalry and common interest forms the backdrop for the ‘agreement of unity’ (Sened-i ˙Ittifak) which powerful provincial dynasts concluded in 1808, and to which the newly enthroned Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) had to acquiesce even though he found it highly objectionable. For while in signing the Sened-i ˙Ittifak the magnates vowed to remain loyal to the sultan, it was a loyalty on their own terms and not on his. That decentralisation could have its advantages for the stabilisation of Ottoman rule has also become apparent from certain studies concerning the mid-nineteenth-century reconstruction of the Ottoman state (Tanzimat). Quite often these books and articles deal in some detail with the preceding state of affairs, which bureaucrats bent on enforcing a modern-type centralisation by 1850were anxious to abolish.
Thus in Albania, eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Ottoman governments had often incorporated mountaineer tribesmen as mercenaries into their armies. Apart from the pay, this employment gave prestige to the men concerned and inculcated loyalty to the sultan, whose officials rarely interfered with the highland communities themselves. By contrast, what the Tanzimat administration aimed to achieve was a disarmed society, whose members would pay taxes just like villagers and townspeople anywhere else, and whose young men could be drafted into the army. Groups refractory to this kind of discipline were classed as ‘uncivilised’ and penalised accordingly: this policy contributed substantially towards undermining loyalty to Ottoman rule.30 Another case in which the eighteenth-century Ottoman government attempted to reintegrate an ‘outlying’ and ‘difficult’ society by means of local privileges, i.e. by instituting a form of decentralisation, involved the Peloponnese (Ottoman Morea) after it had been re-conquered from the Venetians in 1714–15.
Here local notables were encouraged to present their views by means of an assembly known as the senate, an organisation not otherwise current in the Ottoman administrative practise of this time. But the central government proved unable to control the mercenaries who put down the 1770 uprising, when Russian troops had briefly invaded the peninsula and found local support. The incoming Ottoman soldiers had not been paid, and tried to collect overdue sums of money ‘directly at source’; brutal exploitation resulted, and this attempt to rebuild the sultan’s legitimacy by means of consultation with local notables ended in failure.
Research on the power bases of provincial magnates in some cases has also focused on their wives, daughters and sisters. Apart from female members of the Ottoman dynasty on the one hand and townswomen – at least in certain places – on the other, this is the one category of Ottoman women on whom a quantity of information is available. Just as Ottoman princesses through their often multiple marriages formed ties between the dynasty itself and its high-ranking servitors, so the pashas of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Baghdad married off their daughters to their prominent freedmen. Such an alliance enabled a young member of the pasha’s household to better his position, but it also might sanction a previously gained prominence. A similar practice was common among the Mamluk heads of households who in the later1700s came to control Egypt after having evicted their rivals whose power base had been the paramilitary corps of Cairo.32 In some cases the women concerned were able to use this situation in order to gain power and status in their own right. At least in Baghdad, some of them controlled significant amounts of resources, including tax-farms, with which they founded mosques and charitable institutions. For reasons that are not as yet well understood, the women of Anatolian and Balkan magnates do not seem to have enjoyed the same opportunities.
Political culture... Greater or lesser roles allowed to women as well as the obligations of household members – who included slaves and freedmen – towards the heads of their respective households are all part of the cultural context of Ottoman political activity. This latter problematic has been studied with special intensity where Istanbul and Cairo are concerned. Households of assorted grandees, who in some instances were already sources of power in the sixteenth century but whose role increased in the seventeenth and eighteenth, were held together by the subordination and deference of junior to senior members and (as a general rule) of women to men.
In the case of Mamluk households, mutual loyalty was expected from people who were on the same level hierarchically, if the men in question, all manumitted slaves, had been raised together in the same household. Otherwise loyalty was due mainly to socio-political superiors, even though there were some significant exceptions to this rule: thus an Ottoman gentleman, no matter how high he might rise, was expected to show loyalty and deference to his former teacher without regard to the latter’s position. This practice explains why the erstwhile teachers of princes might acquire high office if their former charges ascended the throne.34 As loyalty on the household level was taken for granted, it made sense for eighteenth- or nineteenth-century high officials to see to the promotion, within the bureaucracy, of people raised in their own households: such a person could be expected to further the interests of his patron. In this context sultans were merely the most eminent of household heads, whose court formed the model for all others.
Thus the culture of the Ottoman palace, about which sources are most plentiful, was presumably imitated by vizieral and other politically significant households. Given the great political importance of the military and paramilitary corps, it is surprising that so little work has been done on the ‘barracks culture’ into which these men were socialised, and once again, what we know concerns Istanbul and, above all, Cairo.35 Symbols such as the ‘sword of ‘Alˆı’ played a powerful role as foci for corporate military identity: they were depicted on banners, and stories were told about them that occasionally have come down to us. Another aspect of barracks culture, less edifying and even more poorly documented, involved the strong-arm tactics by which janissaries and others inserted themselves into the urban markets. Here there was doubtless a link to the culture of the street people about whose behaviour Ottoman townsmen not rarely complained in the kadi’s court.
. and culture tout court Certainly there is no longer a ‘black hole’ into which Ottoman cultural history of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be said to have fallen. But it is still true that few poets, authors of chronicles, architects or even political figures who flourished during those centuries have been studied with the intensity devoted, for instance, to the age of Suleyman the Magnificent ¨ (r. 1520–66) and its immediate aftermath.36 Yet in terms of the arts, this period is now understood to have been very productive.
In the construction of monumental mosques and charitable institutions, admittedly, there was something of a hiatus between 1616, when the Sultan Ahmed mosque was completed, and the reign of Ahmed III (1703–30). But the latter commissioned a grand complex in Usk ¨ udar, in the name of his mother, ¨ and most of the later sultans and some of their viziers followed suit. Quite often these eighteenth-century structures were remarkable not for their size and monumentality but rather for their elegant design; in certain instances the central mosque was rather downplayed in favour of the adjacent schools, libraries and even drinking-fountains.37 Inscriptions were now more often written in Ottoman Turkish, and their authors were permitted a degree of poetic licence in celebrating the merits of the relevant pious foundation and its patron.
Certain dignitaries broke with the established custom of building almost all of their mosques and schools in or around Istanbul. Thus Ahmed III’s longterm grand vizier, ˙Ibrahim Pas¸a, raised the Anatolian village of his birth to the status of a town: Nevs¸ehir is today a thriving provincial centre, and the foundation complex built by ˙Ibrahim Pas¸a still forms its monumental core. It can be surmised that this resumption of official benevolence was part of the rebuilding of the Ottoman state structure that took place after the peace of Passarowitz/Pasarofc¸a (1718). Disadvantageous to the Ottomans though the latter agreement may have been, it did inaugurate fifty years in which there were only short wars on the western and northern fronts, and during those same years the central government did make a concerted effort to rebuild its legitimacy, especially by enhancing its religious aura. Widely visible charities were probably intended to demonstrate that the sultan did not only demand sacrifices from his subjects, but was willing to offer something in return. An interesting feature of eighteenth-century provincial building was the inclination of certain patrons to revive elements of local pre-Ottoman traditions. Thus a major khan, built in Aleppo in the late seventeenth century, features stylised felines of the kind that had been used in Mamluk heraldry.38 Near the town of Dogubayazit on the Iranian frontier, a local magnate family built a palace, soon abandoned but still extant, whose style was visibly inspired by Seljuk architecture.39
However, the best-known examples occurred in Cairo, where numerous buildings were put up that featured elements reminiscent of Mamluk building.40 Unfortunately, in the absence of written sources about building practice we can only surmise, but do not really know, what patrons may have intended by adopting this ‘historicist’ style. While the merits and demerits of architecture were not usually discussed in writing, the expansion of domestic consumption in well-to-do households was subject to considerable public dispute. This phenomenon has been observed not only in Istanbul itself, but also in provincial towns. Post-mortem inventories as well as surviving items show that walls decorated with frescoes, larger quantities of textiles, jewellery for women and decorated arms and horse-gear for men all became more abundant in the course of the eighteenth century. Fine woollens were often imported from France or England, and good-quality cottons from India, but in addition local products were in demand, such as the silks produced in Bursa and on the island of Chios.
Miniatures and sultanic decrees also document the interest of wealthy urbanites in fashion changes. In reaction, many sultans attempted to enhance their legitimacy by decreeing sumptuary regulations, echoing the complaints of less well-capitalised artisans who could not easily adapt their products to changing tastes.41 In addition, this increase in consumption was criticised by certain authors who deplored the outflow of precious metal to India, the ‘uppity’ ways of better-off Jewish and Christian males, as well as the – supposedly – increasing financial demands made by women upon their spouses. But all these complaints and prohibitions do not seem to have prevented the establishment, in the course of the eighteenth century, of what might be called an early form of ‘consumer culture’ among well-to-do Ottomans, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
In conclusion It is against the backdrop of the research briefly outlined here that the present volume has been put together. Emphasis has been placed on those topics reflecting current concerns. Thus the eighteenth-century growth of private, domestic culture is a relatively new discovery closely connected to the history of women, and both these issues therefore have been accorded special attention.42 In the last two decades the historiography on Ottoman non-Muslims also has greatly developed, allowing us to regard Ottoman society as more pluralistic, and also more conflict-ridden, than in the past. In addition, the study of provincial history has permitted us to reassess the operation of Ottoman state and society as a whole, the centre not excluded. Local sources, both chronicles and archival documents, have shown that the central administration’s perceptions of its subjects were not necessarily shared by the latter; and that, on the other hand, decentralisation did not always mean political decline. This change of perspective through the use of locally produced sources remains valid even though these records only afford us a view of the aims and strategies of urban and sometimes rural notabilities. It is a sobering thought, all too often repressed, that the hopes and fears of peasants and nomads almost always continue to escape us. Here it may be useful for historians of at least the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to link up with ethnologists, an approach that has proved fruitful to Europeanist historians but has so far been shunned by scholars concerned with the Ottoman Empire.
On the other hand, the present volume has obvious gaps: thus the eighteenth century saw a growing interest in the sciences, especially medicine, among both Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims, and also a concern with European Enlightenment ideas among a certain number of scholars from an Orthodox background.43 Due to limitations of space these issues have not been treated here, although they should have been. In the same vein, Ottoman involvement with the sea, including both maritime trade and naval wars, has received rather a stepmotherly treatment. The Ottoman Empire in this volume appears as a solid land mass, which is true enough but not the whole story: after all, the sultans did, with some justification, claim to reign over both land and sea. Thus a great deal remains to be done, and some of it will be attempted in the near future, insha’allah.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق